When you don't inherit your ethnic culture anymore

Originally Posted by Umma

If you now have the chance to get in touch with your ancestor's culture, do so!

Your heritage is important, just like your race. It's something to be proud of.

Associate with the culture you come from! That's *your* culture. If now you can speak your ancestor's language and use your original family name, why wouldn't you?

Ethnicity comes before nationality!

Yes and no in America. There are some races/groups of people that will not accept you even though you may have 50% their blood.

Originally Posted by eriol

I'm afraid that in the end I would meet rejection. Just like Ulysses, I dont feel chinese anymore. I will just put it straight.
Thinking myself as the part of my country will face me to racism, even though I state that I'm Indonesian, people will address me Indonesian Chinese.
If I address myself Chinese or Dutch it will be nonsense because I hardly know about their culture.

Well It's not entirely bad thing that I dont have culture to be associated with. I see that I'm more open minded than general third generation who still bounded by their culture heritance. But still...

I know what you mean. I'm 1/4 American Indian and both of my grandfathers are 1/2 American Indian (which makes my parents at least 1/4 each and that is passed down to me). My father's tribe hid in the mountains in order to avoid the Trail of Tears movement while I think my mom's tribe either moved with them and then moved to MO/KS or hid in the mountains and then moved to the MO/KS region.

Even into the 1980's, if you claimed to be any part American Indian, you were considered lazy and were not hired for a job. My full-blooded great-grandmothers (2 of 4) were in love with white men (of mixed Euro-Caucasian nationalities) and claimed to be white b/c they were able to pull it off so they could get jobs and work.

I want to learn more about my American Indian people, but I have a few problems: 1) My tribe was destroyed in the Trail of Tears, so I can not register myself as part American-Indian unless I have tribal papers (even if I were pure-bred, I still have to have papers to receive scholarships and such, unlike other races in America). 2) It's really hard to get accepted/adopted into a tribe in order to learn more about them, especially if you look white (which I look more like an albino Indian or an exotic Caucasian). I seriously make Conan O' Brien look Hispanic in skin-tone. 3) The tribes especially frown on people who want to learn more about a tribe "just to discover their heritage and reconnect with their ancestors". These people, even if they do take the blood test to prove they are more than 1/16 American Indian and can prove that their ancestors were on the 1920's census rollout, would never be fully accepted by the tribe. 4) Other people look at me and tell me that b/c I wasn't raised in an American Indian home that I'm a white girl and should put down white b/c I am more white than I am American Indian (especially the African-Americans, I don't know why, but it seems to annoy them that I won't claim to be full-blooded Caucasian). Truthfully, I have more American-Indian blood than Irish, Scottish, British, German, etc., but it's all about the skin color in this region.

I do encourage you to learn as much about your ancestory as possible. I do understand about your family having to give up their heritage in order to satisfy the demands of Government at that time (as did my family). I claim to be "other" now, even though I am nowhere near as knowledgable about my tribe of people as I want to be. However, I think it's wrong to deny someone their heritage because they don't act/look like a pure-bred model of it.

Go for it, but be careful about the backlash.

Jam it back in, in the dark.